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Selling to international customers? How to cross borders with PayTabs

Category: Customer Experience

Selling to international customers? How to cross borders with PayTabs
Mohab Customer Experience 0

Selling to international customers? How to cross borders with PayTabs

With the advent of internet and eCommerce, selling in your backyard is equated with selling in another country. The medium of sale is the same – your website. But then comes the actual legwork of ensuring your product reaches its customer and the money reaches your bank account. There are a lot of minor but significant factors at play here. Marketing, packaging, currency conversion, shipping, taxes, local duties and more make a small business wonder if they are really capable of taking on the complex world of export trade.

Depending on what you are selling, you’ll need partners in each of these spheres who can support you when you start (when the business may not be much but you’ll need the same degree of professional support) and continue supporting you when your business expands and you need high-tech support points.

If you are thinking of taking your products to international shores, here are a few things to keep in mind before you cross borders

  1. Identify markets for your products

Though you may already have a rough idea of where to start, it is always good to back business decisions with data. Where possible, find out about competitors selling in the market and what their on-ground sales have been like. This allows you to make a fair projection of what your sales can be. Now you’ll be able to prioritise markets where you need to enter first based on the expected sales volume.

A successful initial entry matters a lot. It gives you the confidence to push forward and also helps convincing future clients that you sell quality products that are accepted in multiple countries.

For example, the food import laws in several countries are quite stringent. You’ll not only need FDA clearances but also ensure your packaging has all the relevant information that is mandatory for the particular country. During your application, you may even have to specifically mention countries where the particular item has been refused entry.

  1. Identify a local distribution partner / retailer

Many start-ups may not have the means to set up a local office unless the conditions are proven viable. For initial market entry, it is best to go with a local distribution partner. These channel partners should be experienced personnel who can give you a taste of what your future sales can look like. They can also be your resource who can provide intelligence on how to tweak things and make it work.

  1. Understand generic laws and tax laws in each country related to products shipped from your country

Even if your product is sold in a particular international market, there may be specific laws applied to products that are shipped from your country. This may include but not limit to taxes, duties and other general laws on quality and quantity.

  1. Identify a shipping partner

Shipping is a biggie. First, you need to get the packaging right which is acceptable to the country you are shipping to. Second, you need someone who has a reputation for timely delivery. Third, you need to work with someone who can initially deliver small quantities and then grow with you to deliver bigger shipments when your market expands. Lastly, shipping costs can eat into your profits, so you’ll need to calculate the shipping partner who provides all of the above at good rates.

  1. Identify a payment partner

After all the groundwork, you’ll need to guide your hard earned money to reach your bank account. For this you’ll first have to ensure that the payment service provider works with multiple countries and currencies, intuitively adds in the most popular wallets in the country, provides easy APIs and makes transfer easy and allows invoicing even if you are on the go. A tall wish list but entirely possible. Sign up for a free demo account here.

There are many things about international sales and export trade that one can learn only from experience. Success isn’t final and failure isn’t fatal if you have an experienced partner to support your journey.

7 years ago
The psychology of eCommerce Checkouts: how to get your customers to reach the Thank You page
Mohab Customer Experience 0

The psychology of eCommerce Checkouts: how to get your customers to reach the Thank You page

It’s a long journey that your customer takes from discovery to purchase while moving through your sales funnel. During this process there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. Sometimes high potential customers fall through the cracks and leave eCommerce companies wondering where they’ve gone wrong.

You can either make an educated guess on understanding your customers psychology. Or you could analyze patterns in behavioural data to understand and view things from your user’s perspective. In either case, we’ve seen companies keep a close eye on every step of the funnel, scrutinizing their customer’s every move. Here are some tips on the psychology of online checkout that’ll help your customer reach the ‘Thank you’ page successfully.

Discovery

In the online world, being found is equivalent of ‘existing’. If your customers can’t find you, then you don’t exist for them. The sales life cycle starts at this early stage where you take a series of steps to optimize your entire website and especially product pages to ensure customers can find you online.

Category Page design

The category page is an important step for your customer who is deep in the decision-making process on whether or not to make a purchase from you. This is the page that presents them with an array of choices and should be easy to navigate and understand at a glance. It is a page that will either push them to choose a product and keep moving in the direction you want them to… or it will make them bounce right off. The category page must display the most essential information about the product which is the way it looks (image), the name and the price along with discounts if any.
Along with this, there should be easy filters for price, colours, brands and features on the left that allows users to sort and select.

The Product Page

Here’s where the devil lies because here’s where the details truly matter. Most customers will make a purchase decision within 90s of seeing a product. That is a whole one and a half minutes that you have to impress and floor them. In internet time that quite a lot, so you need to make it count.

a) Offer different product views:
People would love to get a ‘feel’ of the product as much as possible before they buy. Is that scarf red or deep orange? What would it feel like to carry that leather purse? Most people try to find answers to these questions by zooming in and trying to get as close to the product as possible from different angles. Some eCommerce websites have seen a 58% increase in sales by simply adding different views of the product.

b) Add as much details as possible in the description:
The very fact that someone has clicked into a product is that they want to know more. Here’s where flowery creative language can be used to convince that there is truly no product like the one they are holding. From colours to sizes, manufacturer details to delivery time, history to usage, provide detailed description on how the product works and how it is a must have.

c) Add a video:
Video is one of the most powerful tools to include in your product detail page. It can be a how-to video, an ad or just a fun video around the product. Any of these are likely to increase engagement from the user. Surveys show that 50% consumers are more confident about their purchase decision after watching a video and they are more likely to return to the website too.

Checkout page design

Checkout pages are notorious for having the highest drop out rates in the sales funnel. These are pages where customers tend to discover hidden charges, feel bored to give out detailed information or may even suddenly face trust issues if they feel the process isn’t as secure as they want. Here’s what you can do

a) No hidden charges
Ensure that your product detail page has all the price info including taxes, shipping and any additional charges (like gift wrapping, express delivery) etc. This will leave no unpleasant surprises during checkout

b) Clearly mention delivery locations
If your product has delivery location restrictions, allow customers to check this in the product detail page before they proceed to checkout.

c) Keep the process simple
Checkout isn’t the place for you to collect your customer’s biodata. Keep the info simple, leading and quick so that people can move through the process quickly.

d) Offer fully secure payment options: Check out the best payment options that your customers want. If many prefer Cash on Delivery (CoD) over cards, you’ll probably have to go the extra mile to ensure they get to pay you the way they want.

e) A great thank you page
Once your customer has brought a product, make the Thank you page engaging with the right information on the product, billing, expected date of delivery and what else they can buy from your site.

Post purchase communication

As a part of procedure, ensure that you send a Thank you email with the purchase details, a communication number if they have any questions.

This purchase is just the beginning. Be prepared to start the serenading process all over again.

7 years ago
Evolution of The Indian Consumer
Mohab Customer Experience 0

Evolution of The Indian Consumer

In one of our previous post, we touched upon the fact that Indian e-commerce has grown tremendously in recent years and digital payments form the core of the Digital India ecosystem. The growth in payments has been driven by the push for online payments at the institutional level, be it government, corporate or banks.

Having said that, the paradigm shift from offline to online has been driven by the Indian Consumer, who has accepted the digital medium. Specifically, in the space of digital payments, the consumer has been forced to reduce his dependency on cash, given the government’s huge demonetization drive last November. Therefore, it would be fair to say that some of the digital adoption in the Indian context has been due to demonetization, especially in the payments space.

Until a year ago, the penetration of Digital Payments in India was rather low. However, owing to the government’s efforts, there has been an explosion in the digital payments space in India. Post demonetization, the number of debit card transactions swore to 1 Billion*. Well, most of these transactions have been PoS(Point of Sale) transactions in physical stores. But a significant number of those transactions have been done online as well and payments have been made in online rather than Cash on Delivery.

As per Industry body, ASSOCHAM, the Indian e-commerce consumer size will most likely cross 100 Million in 2017 and will ride on a 65% growth rate(y-o-y) in 2018. The evolution of the Indian Consumer has been pretty rapid in terms of consumption patterns. The shift from offline to online and from COD (Cash on Delivery) to Online Payment has been rather rapid.

Talking of shifts in preferred mode of payment from Cash on Delivery to Online has been rather ironical, because the growth of Indian e-commerce has been because of the Cash on Delivery model. But, owing to demonetization, the rise in online payments is driving e-commerce growth and will continue to do so, in coming years. This goes to show a significant change in attitude and purchasing habit of the Indian Consumer.

For more such insights, you can subscribe to our blog alerts and if you are a small and medium scale merchant, we can help you go global through our international payments solution. Sign up for a demo, to learn more.

*Source: The Economic Times

7 years ago